Behind the arras: Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

DVD cover (from Sweden) of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Focus Features, 2022. Image source: Kvarnvideo

Business as usual

With the ever-growing attention paid to the Met Gala, and the Met's current "Costume Art" exhibit showcased in its prominent new Condé M. Nast Galleries, it seems that fashion is having (yet another) cultural moment.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, art critic Jed Perl seems disconcerted by the apparent corporate takeover of the first exhibition space encountered by visitors to the Met. He writes,

What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met—and bought it for the foreseeable future. . .Named galleries are nothing new in museums, but naming the galleries devoted to fashion for Condé M. Nast, a publisher instrumental in the development of the fashion industry, is anything but disinterested. . .The cost of the galleries, estimated at something like $50 million, was covered by companies and individuals, all or nearly all of whom have ties to fashion. [1]

Perl gives as an additional example of the influence of the fashion industry on curatorial decisions the designer Thom Browne, current chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Browne donated sufficient money to the building of the fashion galleries that one of them is named after him; he also has at least three pieces in the "Costume Art" show that is inaugurating the galleries. Perl asks, "But didn’t anybody worry about the impression of a quid pro quo? When it comes to fashion, does the Met regard this as business as usual?"

The short answer is yes. The Met has a long history of financial connections to the fashion industry, which has played a huge and determinative role in how fashion is collected and depicted at the Met.

In 1946 Dorothy Shaver, president of the department store Lord & Taylor, was instrumental in raising money from garment manufacturers and other fashion-associated businesses to establish the Costume Institute at the Met.

"What is the American Look? It is made of many things: Dorothy Shaver (standing) discusses with artist Dorothy Hood and Art Director Rodman virtues and flaws of girls applying as American Look models." Life, 21 May 1945, p. 88. Photo credit: Nina Leen. Image source: Internet Archive

Two years later, fashion industry publicist Eleanor Lambert organized the first Met Gala as a benefit for the Costume Institute. Lambert was already an influential tastemaker in art and fashion, and her sponsorship of the Gala ensured its continuing success.

Eleanor Lambert in a James Galanos floral evening gown, ca. 1952–53. Image source: The Bend Bulletin

Although the Costume Institute became a curatorial department of the Met in 1959, the powerful influence of the fashion industry continued. In 1972 Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar who had just been fired after a decade as editor-in-chief of Vogue, became a "special consultant" to the Costume Institute. She organized its annual exhibitions into the late 1980s. It was Vreeland who introduced the idea of annual themes for the Costume Institute exhibits and their associated Galas.

Diana Vreeland, ca. late 1970s. Image source: Mercht

In 1995, the then-current editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour, became the chair of the Met Gala and organizer of the Costume Institute's annual exhibitions, positions she holds to this day. Vogue was and is the flagship publication of Condé Nast. In recognition of her fundraising for the Costume Institute, in 2014 the wing of the Met housing the Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Wintour continued as editor-in-chief of Vogue until 2025, when she became Global Chief Content Officer and Artistic Director of Condé Nast. Now Condé Nast has funded the Met galleries in which the Anna Wintour Costume Center's collection will be exhibited. All very cosy and circular.

Clarissa Alcock, Anna Wintour, and Annette Reed at the 1995 Met Gala. Photo credit: Nick Haddow. Image source: Yahoo News UK

Fashion and sustainability

It's ironic that fashion is attaining unprecedented cultural influence at a moment when we are facing a global sustainability crisis. The core business model of the fashion industry is, of course, anti-sustainability: convincing us that the clothes we wore just last year are shamefully out of date and need to be replaced.

The fashion industry is not only predicated on planned obsolescence, but as designer Natsai Audrey Chieza has noted,

. . .the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world [second only to the petroleum industry, according to some accounts]. Most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. Processing textiles requires huge amounts of water. And since the oil age completely transformed the textile industry, many of the materials and the chemicals used to process them are petroleum based. And so coupled with our insatiable appetite for fast fashion, a huge amount of textile waste [in the US, roughly 85 percent] is ending up in landfill every year because it remains notoriously difficult to recycle.

The fashion industry has also outsourced the manufacture of its products to low-wage countries with few worker protections and lax environmental regulations. The finished clothes then are shipped around the world to the points of purchase, creating supply-chain emissions and waste.

The fashion industry's exploitative practices are not limited to the manufacture of its products, of course, but also feature explicitly in their promotion, in which profits are generated by portraying the bodies and fostering the insecurities of young women. In model Cameron Russell's widely viewed TED talk, she says that while half of 13-year-old girls in the United States express dissatisfaction with their bodies, by the time they are 17 that figure rises to nearly 80 percent. Her talk was given in 2012, just after the founding of Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, and four years before the appearance of TikTok. A recent study has stated that among young women, "intensity of social media use has been shown to be associated with poorer psychological well-being, including more negative body image" [2].

Haute couture portrays itself as standing outside of this system; its designs are often one-of-a-kind, custom-sewn and -fitted creations. However, high-end fashion houses and the conglomerates that own them generally also produce ready-to-wear clothing. The haute couture collections can be seen as reputation-building loss leaders that promote more profitable ready-to-wear lines. High fashion has gone mainstream.

Which brings us to the subject of today's post:

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) features E&I favorite Lesley Manville as Ada Harris, a charwoman in 1950s London. One day Mrs. Harris sees a Christian Dior gown in the closet of one of her employers, and is overwhelmed by the beauty of its design and the fineness of its materials and construction. It is unlike any dress that she has ever seen up close before, and she yearns to be able to wear one like it.

Lesley Manville as the title character in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Image source: Focus Features

With her war widow's pension and her life savings (multiplied by what turns out to be a fortunate bet), she travels to Paris to obtain an evening gown from the source: the Dior atelier.

She quickly learns from snooty atelier manager Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) that Dior serves an exclusive clientele that does not include charwomen. However, Mrs. Harris is rescued by one of those clients, the Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), who invites her to the presentation of the new collection as his guest. [3]

The Dior atelier is in some financial difficulties due to the habitually belated payments of their rich clientele, and Mrs. Harris's ready cash convinces Dior to accept her as a customer. Mrs. Harris desires a red dress called "Temptation," but it is claimed by a regular client, and so she selects an alternate dress in green—still very beautiful, but not the one she most wished for. Although at first she is treated with condescension and hostility by Madame Colbert, she ultimately wins over the staff, acts as matchmaker to a shy couple among them, and points the atelier to a way out of its financial bind by expanding its customer base. It is a lovely and sentimental story in which every catastrophe ultimately leads to a better outcome, and good will and solidarity win out over divisions of class and circumstance. Lesley Manville gives a delightful performance in the title role, and we enjoyed the movie very much.

Behind the arras

In reality, Christian Dior was bankrolled by one of the wealthiest textile manufacturers in France. The house, founded in late 1946, offered its "Corolla" collection just a few months later. The collection, which featured a tailored look on the upper body and narrow waists paired with full skirts, was referred by Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow as "The New Look." It was a decisive repudiation of wartime austerity, featuring luxurious fabrics and, for the skirts, shocking amounts of expensive yardage, and it made Dior instantly famous.

Dior's New Look, Spring-Summer 1947. Image source: Dior.com

The house quickly added added an accessories shop selling Dior-designed hats, scarves, handbags, jewellery and other accessories; later perfume and shoes were added. By 1949 Dior had opened a second store in Manhattan, and by 1950 according to one estimate accounted for 5% of France's entire export revenue. [4] So the house did not need Mrs. Harris's advice to improve its financial position; it was dominant almost from the first.

All this is not to say that everyone (and not just the wealthiest people in consumer economies) should not have beautiful, well-made, durable clothing. But in making fashion a mass-cultural obsession, the fashion industry—as so eloquently described by Cameron Russell in an interview with TED Radio Hour's Manoush Zomorodi—has instead developed a global system of gendered exploitation for its own profit.

It's a system that frequently has damaging consequences for those caught in it, as in the notorious sexual exploitation of young women in the modelling industry. The consequences can also be deadly: in 2013 a nine-story building near Dhaka, Bangladesh that contained five garment factories collapsed, killing over 1100 workers and injuring more than twice that number, mostly women. A report by Adiba Afros and Sifat E Nur Khanam published in The Daily Star (Dhaka) on 18 April 2026 and headlined "Rana Plaza, 13 years on: No justice, no memory," points out that "after 13 years, there has been little movement on accountability—not a single court has yet delivered a final judgment [against those responsible]. While humanitarian aid was provided, no compensation has been paid [to victims or their families] for the most devastating catastrophe in the history of the global fashion industry."

"Rescuers and volunteers navigate the catastrophic ruins of the Rana Plaza building in Savar following its collapse on April 24, 2013." Image source: The Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)

Among the brands for which the factories produced clothing were luxury retailer El Corte Inglés, Benetton, Mango, and The Children's Place.

But the fashion industry tries to mask the suffering involved in the manufacture and distribution of its products. And the presentation of its designs in the Met's Condé M. Nast Galleries, which (in Jed Perl's words) "have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique," is a key element of this campaign. As Perl concludes, the Met has allowed itself to become "an infomercial for the fashion industry."

Update 2 September 2026: For the 2027 Met Gala and exhibition Anna Wintour had planned to honor the fashion designer John Galliano, who has won British Designer of the Year four times. Galliano has been Wintour's protégé throughout his career.

He was head designer at Christian Dior from 1996 until February 2011, when he was suspended and later fired when a video surfaced from the previous October of Galliano telling two women at the Paris café La Perle, "I love Hitler. People like you would be dead today—your mothers, your forefathers would be f***ing gassed and f***ing dead. . .You're ugly." The video is available on YouTube, should you be interested.

But it's not like his reign at Dior had been without controversy before he drunkenly spewed his hatred in public. His 2000 "clochard" (tramp) collection featured ripped and torn clothes that looked like they'd been assembled from old newspapers, accessorized with empty bottles of alcohol. The runway models were made up to look as though their faces were smeared with dirt, and their hair was tousled as though by exposure to the elements. He defended aestheticizing poverty, homelessness and addiction through luxury commodities by saying that he drew inspiration from the Parisian "Rag Balls," which were held during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and where the rich amused themselves by dressing as beggars.

A dress from John Galliano's "Clochard" Collection, 2000. Image source: Pinterest

When Galliano's horrifying comments and attitudes were surfaced once again this summer, on 31 August he withdrew from the planned exhibition and Gala (under, we might imagine, strong pressure). Whether there will be lasting damage to Wintour's reputation and influence is not yet known.

In this episode, the cronyism, corruption, and appalling politics of the fashion industry and its artwashing exponent, the Met's Costume Institute, could not have been made more blatantly evident.

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1. Jed Perl, "Fashion Forward: Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold prime gallery space to the fashion industry?" New York Review of Books, 23 July 2026. [subscription required]
2. Jaehee Jung, David Barron, Young-A Lee, Viren Swami. 2022. "Social media usage and body image: Examining the mediating roles of internalization of appearance ideals and social comparisons in young women." Computers in Human Behavior 135: 107357. Figshare.com
3. The film is a remake of Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, a 1992 CBS-TV movie of Paul Gallico's 1958 novel of the same title. In the role of the charwoman Ada Harris, the 1992 version offered Angela Lansbury, with Diana Rigg as Madame Colbert and Omar Sharif as the Marquis.
4. Leah McGrath Goodman, "A Surprisingly Modern Take on America From a Long-Dead Frenchman," Newsweek, 21 January 2015.

Suggested reading: The first ten weeks edition

Protestors march in New York City on 5 April 2025. Image source: Associated Press

Yesterday hundreds of thousands of protestors gathered across the country to oppose the actions of the new administration. Its first ten weeks have been a spectacle of cruelty, crudity, corruption and mendacity that have exceeded, if that's the word, even my abysmal expectations. The attempted destruction of government services and vital data relating to health, education, social benefit programs, scientific research, environmental protection, worker and consumer safety, and financial fraud; the suppression of free speech, the arrest and deportation of legal immigrants for constitutionally-protected activities, and attacks on schools and academic freedom; the rampant self-dealing and conflicts of interest; the exposure of highly sensitive personal data; the defiance of court orders; the list could go on, and on.

This edition of "Suggested reading" takes a look at the current administration, our historical amnesia, and the state of our politics:

1. "From comedy to brutality," Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books, 13 March 2025.

   In the days surrounding his inauguration, He Who Shall Not Be Named offered to buy Greenland from Denmark (and told reporters that he would not rule out seizing it by military force), suggested that he would annex Canada as "the 51st state," threatened to invade Panama to reassert U.S. control of the Canal, and proclaimed that the U.S. would "own" Gaza and resettle its population.

   You might think that these ideas were unique to the considerable idiosyncrasies of the current occupier of the White House. However, as Fintan O'Toole reveals in the New York Review of Books, all of these schemes have long and often ignoble histories:

• Greenland: After the U.S. Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward requested "A Report on the Resources of Greenland and Iceland," which was issued in 1868. The U.S. had just purchased Alaska from Russia, and Seward was contemplating a similar deal with Denmark for Greenland and Iceland (but nothing came of it).

  

  Arctic Boundary as defined by the Arctic Research and Policy Act (modified by geographic labels). Map author: Allison Gaylord. Image source: US Arctic Research Commission

  And after World War II, during which the U.S. military occupied Greenland to deny its use to Germany, President Harry Truman approached Denmark with an offer to buy it (but nothing came of it). Eighty years later the U.S. still operates a major military base there, now called Pituffik Space Base.

  Greenland is actually closer to Moscow (2390 miles) than to Washington, DC (2620 miles), and closer to Copenhagen (1860 miles) than to the nearest location in the U.S.: Madawaska, a town at the northernmost tip of Maine just across the St. John River from Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada (1930 miles). [1]

  In short, whoever should have sovereignty over Greenland, geography would suggest that it isn't the U.S. A wild idea: perhaps the people who live there should govern themselves, and control Greenland's mineral and other resources? But as we know from many contexts, some discussed below, when you are occupying increasingly desirable real estate it is money, power, and violence that usually decide the outcome.

• Canada: From its very inception as a nation, the U.S. has had territorial designs on its northern neighbor. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the War of American Independence, the U.S. demanded and received all of the territory of the British Province of Quebec south of the Great Lakes; today, that territory comprises the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as eastern Minnesota, western Pennsylvania, and about half of New York. In 1787, the Articles of Confederation contained a clause admitting the rest of British Canada as a state if it voted to join the former colonies (it didn't).

  

  The thirteen original colonies in 1774 (detail), McConnell Map Co., 1919. Image source: Library of Congress

  During the War of 1812 the U.S. invaded Canada in a campaign to capture Montreal, the key to the rest of Quebec; the invading forces were defeated almost as soon as they crossed the border. But the dream didn't die; in the late 19th century William Seward, Henry Adams, and the poet Walt Whitman, among many others, envisaged a United States that encompassed Canada. HWSNBN's annexation plan is just the latest irruption of this idea—probably one of the very few ideas he shares with Walt Whitman.

• Panama owes its existence to U.S. intervention. In 1903, the U.S. encouraged Panama, then a province of Colombia, to declare independence, and then immediately bought the rights to the land through which the Panama Canal would be carved. By happy coincidence, the Panamanian representative in the negotiations also worked for the French company that had been given a concession to build the canal across the isthmus. The deal included a $10 million payment to the Panamanian government plus annual rent of $250,000; $40 million went to the French company for the land rights.

  

  "The Coup d'Etat," by Charles G. Bush, New York World, 8 November 1903. Image source: The Age of Revolutions

  As historian Justin J. Masucci writes on the website The Age of Revolutions, "Panama granted the U.S. the right to build and operate an inter-ocean canal and also gave the U.S. de facto sovereignty over a ten mile-wide territory around the canal in perpetuity — in effect creating a U.S. colony in Panama." Panama remained a client state of the U.S. until the 1960s. It didn't gain jurisdiction over the Canal Zone until 1979, or control of the canal itself until 31 December 1999.

  

  Panama Canal and Canal Zone. Image source: Project Gutenberg

  Under the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty that eventually turned control of the canal over to Panama, the U.S. retained the right to militarily defend the neutrality of the canal. However, it pledged to "abstain. . .from any intervention in the internal affairs of the Republic of Panama." [2] But just a dozen years after the signing of the treaty, U.S. armed forces invaded Panama to depose and take prisoner its leader Manuel Noriega and re-establish a U.S.-friendly government.
  
  Panama City is conveniently located next to the Pacific entrance of the canal. Any U.S. military invasion of the Canal Zone would inevitably involve its capture and the replacement of Panama's leaders, extending a long legacy of U.S. dominance of the country.

• Gaza: While rhetorically disapproving of Israeli settlement on Palestinian lands as an impediment to a two-state solution, the U.S. government has continued to provide an uninterrupted flow of weapons to Israeli governments. [3] According to the Council on Foreign Relations, since the end of World War II, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid by a factor of two. [4]
  
  Aid has continued to flow since the Oslo Accords in 1993 as the number of Israeli settlements and "outposts" has more than doubled, as the number of West Bank settlers has increased by more than four times to nearly half a million, and as the number of settlers in East Jerusalem has grown to nearly a quarter of a million. [5]

  

  Settler population growth in the West Bank, 1993–2023. Image source: Peace Now

  U.S. aid has provided direct and indirect support for this expansion.

  

  U.S. military and economic aid to Israel since 1970. Source: Council on Foreign Relations

  And during the Israeli government's assault on Gaza in 2024 U.S. military aid more than quadrupled from 2023 levels, to $12.5 billion. That assault has resulted in an estimated death toll to date of over 50,000 men, women and children. The weapons and munitions that resulted in this death and destruction are largely supplied by the U.S. [6] 

  And not only munitions: the Israeli military uses AI and cloud computing services supplied by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and Amazon. According to an article by the Associated Press, "An Israeli intelligence officer told the AP that AI has been used to help pinpoint all targets in the past three years." These, then, must include the "pinpointing" of a car being driven by Hoda Hijazi. Her mother and her three daughters, Rimas, 14, Taline, 12, and Liane, 10, were killed, and later falsely claimed by the Israeli military to have been "Hamas targets." [7] Medical facilities and personnel, aid workers and journalists have also been targeted.

  

  Gaza in March 2024. Image source: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East

  So HWSNBN's open endorsement of the forcible relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza does not seem to many Palestinians to be a radical departure from decades of implicit U.S. policy. The mildest term for such an action is "ethnic cleansing" (implying that the existing population is filth that needs to be swept away), which came into use during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The UN Commission of Experts stated that such actions "constitute crimes against humanity and can be assimilated to specific war crimes. Furthermore, such acts could also fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention." [8]

  

  Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed homes and buildings in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, 14 March 2025. Image credit: Jehad Alshrafi/AP. Image source: NPR

  On 26 February, The Guardian reported that HWSNBN had posted a "bizarre AI-generated video" on his social media site depicting Gaza as a luxury seaside resort, or as he called it in a 4 February press conference, "the Riviera of the Middle East":

  Words fail.

2. "An Expanding Vision of America," Nicole Eustace, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   Of course, dispossession and genocide were foundational acts of the U.S. itself. As Nicole Eustace writes in her NYRB article,

   . . .at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement.

   I have some disagreement with the way this statement is framed. First, it seems to anachronistically attribute to Native peoples a capitalistic ownership model of land and natural resources. Second, the phrase "exploitation of Native peoples" obfuscates how deadly the encounters between settlers and Native peoples were.

   

   California's indigenous history: Native people of this place. Image source: Digital Humanities at Santa Clara University

   Taking the state I live in as an example, in 1849 it's estimated that there were 150,000 Native people living in California. Drawing on Benjamin Madley's An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (Yale University Press, 2016), Eustace points out that this population had already been decimated: these were "survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769." By 1870, after two decades of murder, starvation, disease, and the seizure and privatization of the land, the estimated Native population was reduced by 80%, to 30,000. Over that same period the settler population grew from around 95,000 to over half a million. [9]
   
   Today, people who claim at least some continental American or Alaskan native ancestry make up 3.6% of the California population, a lower percentage than the estimated 5.4% of 1870. The three California counties with the lowest percentage of people with native ancestry are in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. [10] The Native peoples of California, as with others discussed in this post, had the misfortune to occupy land that other, more powerful people wanted.

3. "A Self Divided," Laura Marsh, New York Review of Books, 27 March 2025.

   The appalling spectacle of our current politics may be partially understood through reference to a study conducted at the University of Virginia in 2014. As Laura Marsh explains in the NYRB, the researchers

   asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable.
   
   In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. "Simply being alone with their own thoughts" was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would "rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all."

   Two-thirds of the college-age American men in this study would rather give themselves an electric shock than be "alone with their own thoughts" for as little as six minutes.

   In The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025), journalist Chris Hayes points to this study as a way to explain why many people spend a majority of their free time scrolling on their phones. As Marsh writes,

   The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it's possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab [app to app?], or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished.

   For social media addicts, "the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing," the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, "The actual point of 'screen time' is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up."

   

   Image source: OpenAccessGovernment.org

   Hayes contrasts the social media model with the old television model. Decades ago TV producers needed to create programming that would hold your attention for 30 to 60 minutes at a time, or longer: I remember in the early 1970s regularly watching, along with my whole family, the entire three-hour Saturday night CBS lineup of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show. A little later on I would follow this with the local 11 o'clock news and then switch to NBC for two new shows, Saturday Night Live (three Saturdays a month) or Weekend (one Saturday a month). The idea was to root you to the spot to provide a reliable audience for advertisers.

   The social media model is compared to playing a slot machine, "where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the outcome of the bet." Hayes writes,

   What will hold people's attention? [Social media companies] don't have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

   HWSNBN is a master of using repeated distraction to grab attention. As Marsh notes,

   He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy. . .[but] the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of [HWSNBN]—sticks out.

   As Antonia Hitchens writes in the London Review of Books ("At CPAC," 20 March), in 2018 former HWSNBN strategist Steve Bannon called this technique "flooding the zone." As he put it, "If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one."
   
   Of course, HWSNBN also has the advantage of almost universal name recognition from his "decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality"—combining the advantages of old and new media. HWSNBN is the first social media president; others must inexorably follow.
   
   Our 21st-century technological innovations are ironically returning us to the late 19th century, when the main features of our politics were cynical and corrupt party loyalty and grotesque smear campaigns, and when our economy was dominated by exploitative robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and Leland Stanford. It was a time of extreme anti-labor violence, inequality, anti-immigrant actions, and ideological conformity. Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Only this time around no one other than the crew of billionaires, ideologues, enablers and toadies surrounding HWSNBN is laughing.

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1. Air distances calculated from Greenland's geographical center on the Distance.to website.
2. "Treaty Concerning the Permanent Neutrality and Operation of the Panama Canal," U.S. Department of State Archive.
3. The only exceptions I've found: in 1982 the Reagan Administration refused to provide cluster bombs to Israel after they were used against civilians; in 1991 the Bush Administration delayed a $10 billion loan package for four months when Israel's government would not pledge not to use the aid to build more settlements; and in 2024 the Biden Administration paused a shipment of 2,000-lb bombs because similar munitions had been dropped on Gaza, causing many civilian deaths.
4. Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts. Council on Foreign Relations, 13 November 2024.
5. Peace Now Settlement Watch, 30 Years After Oslo – The data that shows how the settlements proliferated following the Oslo Accords, September 2023.
6. Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Anas Baba, and Daniel Estrin, Palestinian deaths in Gaza rise above 50,000 as Israel expands its military campaign, NPR, 25 March 2025.
7. Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick and Garance Burke, "As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies," Associated Press, 18 February 2025.
   
8. Ethnic Cleansing, Definitions of Genocide and Related Crimes, United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Note to idiots and trolls: my reportage of these facts does not imply support of Hamas.
9. Oakland Museum of California. Resource 6-1a: California Population by Ethnic Groups, 1790-1880.
10. U.S. Census Bureau. California 2020 census.

Suggested reading: Will press lever for food

Cain having just murdered his brother Abel by Henri Vidal, 1896, Tuileries Garden, Paris. Photo credit: Alex E. Proimos; image source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (Attribution 2.0 Generic)

1. Gen Z

Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z, and whatever comes after: generational labeling has never been so prevalent. But do generational labels and their accompanying generalizations really tell us anything that's not obvious?

In "Gen Z and Me" [1], Joe Moran, professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University, points out that some generational differences are real (though their significance is another matter). In communication styles and the use of technology, for example, (most) members of Gen Z differ from (most) members of previous generations. In general, Gen Z derides email (requires too much time to read or write) and has developed elaborate unwritten rules defining online etiquette. The political attitudes of (many) members of Gen Z on issues such as gender and sexual identity, privacy, racial justice and climate change can also differ from those of (at least some) members of previous generations. But Moran points to two recent books that draw contrasting conclusions about what these technological and attitudinal differences really mean.

In Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a Stanford anthropologist (Roberta Katz), an Oxford linguist (Sarah Ogilvie), an Oxford historian (Jane Shaw) and a Lancaster University—now King's College London—sociologist (Linda Woodhead) use interviews with college students try to explain Gen Z to everyone else. Moran writes that, according to Gen Z Explained, the members of Gen Z have

created rich and hard-to-penetrate subcultures. What they mostly like to do, the book argues, is to collaborate in leaderless groups. They use digital tools to create shared documents, sync their calendars, write and read fan fiction, play games together. They use apps to organise lift-sharing, couch-surfing and political activism. The authors further 'explain' Generation Z by pointing to the intricate language and etiquette of their online lives. Post-millennials can quickly convey their pleasure or displeasure through memes. They use emojis as a 'social lubricant' and bracket words with asterisks and tildes for emphasis and irony. Whether they write 'k' or 'kk' to mean 'OK' is charged with meaning. The first is curt; the second is cheerful and casual, a way to temper the brusqueness of the single letter. These tonal shadings matter because post-millennials like to state their intentions clearly. Self-labelling, especially of fine-grained sexual and gendered identities, has become an 'imperative'. They think it important to be themselves, to admit their struggles and vulnerabilities, to say what they mean. In the iGen Corpus, a digital data bank compiled by Ogilvie of seventy million words used by post-millennials, terms such as real, true, honest and fake occur far more often than in general language use.

But being earnest, creating subcultures and language that are impenetrable to people your parents' age and using technology that befuddles them are all just part of being in your teens and early twenties. Earlier generations did the same things, while members of their parents' generation rolled their eyes, complained, or thought that it heralded the end of civilization:

• Gen Zers spend too much of their time bent over their phones texting their friends? "Youth is the age when people are most devoted to their friends or relations or companions, as they are then extremely fond of social intercourse and have not yet learnt to judge their friends or indeed anything else by the rule of expediency."

• The mocking memes and references Gen Zers exchange seem bizarre? "If the young commit a fault, it is always on the side of excess and exaggeration. . .they carry everything too far, whether it be their love or hatred or anything else. . .Finally, they are fond of laughter and consequently facetious, facetiousness being a more cultivated form of insolence."

• They are far too ready to take offense? "They are passionate, irascible and apt to be carried away by their impulses."

• Their self-righteousness is irritating? "They think they know everything and are absolutely sure in their assertions; this is in fact the reason of their carrying everything too far."

• They seize on and abandon trends with bewildering rapidity? "They are changeable too and fickle in their desires, which are as transitory as they are vehement; for their wishes are keen without being permanent, like a sick man's fits of hunger and thirst."

As you may have suspected, the quotes above are taken from a source written a few generations back: they're from Aristotle's Rhetoric, written two and a half millennia ago in the 4th century BCE. [2] For a compendium of similarly parallel comments about Gen Y/Millennials and the youth of previous generations, see "People have always whinged about young adults. Here's proof." [3]

In The Generation Myth: Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think (Basic, 2021, published in the UK as Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?), King's College London professor of public policy Bobby Duffy "argues that the discourse around generational difference is 'a mixture of fabricated battles and tiresome clichés'." In Duffy's view, most "generational difference" is a "lifecycle effect":

Sociologists give three explanations for the change in people’s attitudes and behaviours over time: period effects, lifecycle effects and cohort effects. Period effects describe change across all age groups: the result of sweeping societal shifts. Lifecycle effects describe change resulting from the ageing process or in response to key events such as leaving home, becoming a parent or retiring. Cohort effects describe change that results from shared generational experiences. Duffy, a professor of public policy, argues that the current discussion attributes too much to cohort effects and not enough to period and lifecycle effects.

In other words, many of what seem unbridgeable differences between older generations and Gen Z have to do with the phase of life, late adolescence and young adulthood, that Gen Z is passing through. Older people judge younger people not in comparison to the way they actually behaved when they were the same age, but in comparison to an idealized memory distorted by the way they are today: older, sadder, perhaps wiser, and probably further behind the technological curve.

One common complaint about (many) members of Gen Z is their sense of entitlement. Teachers complain that students seem to want infinitely flexible deadlines and to receive good grades no matter what their actual effort or achievement. This isn't because Gen Z members are uniquely lazy or incompetent, but because students have vastly more leverage now than in the past.

"What grades really mean," by Jorge Cham, 2014. Image source: Piled Higher and Deeper (www.phdcomics.com)

2. "Liking" good grades

Grades have little to do with learning. They do not measure it, and if anything the emphasis placed on grades (a short-term goal based on punishment for failure) is actually counterproductive to expanding students' knowledge and capacities (a long-term and cumulative project based on engaging and rewarding curiosity).

There's another way in which grades are a meaningless measure: they shift over time so that similar levels of proficiency receive ever-higher levels of assessment. Grade inflation is real, but it is not the fault of either students or instructors. It is the inescapable result of our dysfunctional system of funding higher education. As Lorna Finlayson writes about the UK higher education system in "Everyone Hates Marking" [4]:

The proportion of firsts [first-class honours degrees] has more than doubled in the last ten years: it's simply not plausible that the overall standard of education has risen dramatically in this period. What has changed is the marketisation of universities, which introduced pressures that make so-called inflation inevitable, linking institutions' material fortunes to league table positions while financially incentivising the 'recruitment' of as many students as possible.

In both the US and Britain, state support of public higher education has plummeted. This has been a long-term trend over the past several decades, and its negative effects are now unavoidable. Colleges and universities are expected to make up the difference between lower levels of state support and ever-higher operating expenses by enrolling more students and charging higher tuition. In order to attract more students and charge them more, schools have to compete with each other in catering to their wants.

Of course, it's a Catch-22: more students require more dorms, more classrooms, more instructors, more support staff, and more library books, increasing costs further. And raising tuition is not only directly counter to the mission of public universities to provide an affordable education to every state resident who qualifies, it burdens students with ever-higher levels of debt.

Most of the additional instructors who are being hired to teach these larger undergraduate cohorts are part-time, non-tenure track adjunct lecturers. Since they generally have no research responsibilities, their continued employment from semester to semester is dependent almost entirely on good student evaluations of their teaching. However, student evaluations do not correlate with learning and have been shown to exhibit systematic gender, age, and racial bias. In addition, instructors who are perceived to be "tough graders" receive lower evaluations, particularly if they are women. [5]

Since it's so strongly in the economic interest of colleges and universities to enlarge enrollments, it's no mystery why grades for similar levels of proficiency keep moving up the scale: we have created a system in which, to remain employed, instructors must chase "likes" from their students. And students like good grades.

"Will press lever for food" by Craig Swanson. Image source: Perspicuity (www.perspicuity.com)

3. The Reaction Economy

This is an example of what William Davies terms "The Reaction Economy" [6]. He writes,

The behaviourist tradition that came to dominate American psychology in the 20th century, pioneered by John B. Watson after the First World War and later identified with B.F. Skinner, was established with the explicit aim of rendering human responses predictable and thereby controllable. Psychology would abandon any theory of mind in favour of data on observable behaviour. Behaviourists imagined a wholly conditioned, programmable person. . .

The behaviourist tradition has revealed a lot about how humans (and other animals) respond to different stimuli. . .But it tells us nothing about the vast amounts of time and labour that societies such as ours now invest in actively trying to generate and capture reactions of various kinds, not just in science laboratories or hospitals, but across the economy, public sphere and civil society.

On the contrary: far from telling us nothing about the reaction economy, behaviorism's explicit goal is "predictable and thereby controllable" responses; think of laboratory rats pressing levers for a reward. And the biggest behaviorist experiment in human history is currently underway. On social media, search engines and other commercial sites companies track your "engagement," clicks and "likes," and sell your attention to advertisers based on predictions of your behavior. Your responses to the ads you see become more data points in an endless feedback loop. This system has been memorably described by social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff as "surveillance capitalism." And the engine driving it is the technology sector centered in Northern California that since at least 1970 has been called Silicon Valley.

Cupertino, California: Aerial photo of Apple new campus building, April 13, 2017. Photo credit: Uladzik Kryhin. Image source: Shutterstock

4. Silicon Valley

The man who founded what became Silicon Valley was William Shockley. As a researcher at Bell Labs in New Jersey after World War II Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which he and his colleagues jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. That same year he founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California, in what was then known as the Santa Clara Valley. A key reason for Shockley's choice of location: his mother lived in Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and the next town over as you headed north from Mountain View towards San Francisco.

Shockley had a good eye for talent, but as John Lanchester writes in "Putting the Silicon in Silicon Valley" [7], he was "an outstandingly horrible human being." He divorced his wife when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer, he actively promoted racist and eugenicist views, and few could stand to work with or for him. Just a year after the founding of Shockley Semiconductor eight of its leading researchers left to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. A decade later two of the eight, Robert Noyce (co-inventor of the integrated circuit) and Gordon Moore (formulator of Moore's Law) split off from Fairchild to form Intel. Along with Texas Instruments, Fairchild and Intel dominated microchip design for decades.

But manufacturing chips was expensive, even in the low-wage nonunion states to which these companies moved their production, and in 1968 to increase profits Texas Instruments built a chip fabrication plant in Taiwan. Lanchester writes, "The investment would also give the US a stake in defending Taiwan, at a time when America’s enthusiasm for Asian military adventures was at a low ebb. TI committed to build their Taiwan fab [fabrication plant] in 1968. In 1980 they shipped their billionth chip. A new strategy was in place."

A key figure in the strategic integration of Taiwan into the microchip supply chain and thus the US military perimeter was a man named Morris Chang. Born in mainland China in 1931, he emigrated to the US in 1949, and after getting bachelor's and master's degrees at MIT and a TI-sponsored PhD at Stanford, eventually became vice-president in charge of TI's microchip division.

After leaving TI, in 1987 Chang founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which for decades has produced many of the most advanced microchips. Advanced microchips are crucial to the development of new military technologies, including AI.

Risk 60th Anniversary Edition Board Game created by by Albert Lamorisse and produced by Hasbro. Image source: Best Buy

5. Meet the new strategy, same as the old strategy

A major driver of China's interest in absorbing Taiwan is that by seizing the world's most advanced microchip fabrication plants it would control the chip supply to the rest of the world—most especially the US—and gain a large technological and military advantage.

As Lanchester writes,

China has to import powerful microchips. The numbers involved are substantial. For most of this century, China has spent more money on importing microchips than it has on importing oil. . .China is acutely aware of its dependence on the West in this area.

In October 2022, the Biden administration instituted a ban on advanced microchip exports to China by US companies and any foreign companies that use US microchips—in practice, a global ban (although enforcing it is another question).

This has disturbing parallels with the events leading up to World War II in the Pacific. In July 1940 the US placed an aviation fuel and scrap iron embargo on an expansionist Japan that had already brutally invaded and occupied Manchuria and was in renewed conflict with China. In September 1940 Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The US imposed a total oil embargo in August 1941; four months later on 7 December Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and a month after that invaded the Dutch East Indies, a major producer of rubber and oil. [8]

Lanchester concludes,

The chip ban has been described as a 'declaration of economic war'. And perhaps not only economic war. The assumption in military circles is that AI is going to be crucial to the next wave of innovation in warfare. The AI revolution will depend on new chip technology. The second Cold War is going to be a military-technological contest just like the first one, and once again semiconductors are going to be central. We are starting to get glimpses of what that might look like, with the first arrivals of drone swarms on battlefields. Coming soon: unmanned vehicles, fire-and-forget missiles, 'loitering munition systems' and facial recognition assassination drones. Advanced chips are as crucial to the process of designing new weapons systems as to the weapons themselves, because the majority of testing for these systems is done on computers. Fingers crossed that all this helps with avoiding World War Three.

Yeah—embargoes worked so well at heading off World War II.

Update 5 July 2023: An article in The Guardian today, "Chip Wars" by Amy Hawkins, reports that the Biden administration is considering expanding existing restrictions to include some less advanced chips, as well as some cloud services. The Netherlands, home of advanced-chip maker ASML, is also expected to increase its restrictions. On 30 June the Dutch government announced that export restrictions on photolithography equipment manufactured by ASML that is used to etch circuits onto microchips would go into effect on 1 September.

Update 16 November 2025: In late October of this year Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of Harvard College (the undergraduate programs of Harvard University), released a report on grade inflation at her institution. It points out that "in 2005, As accounted for 24% of all grades awarded in Harvard College; in 2015, for 40.3%; in 2025, for 60.2%." Harvard's median undergraduate grade-point average is now 4.0.

Students self-report spending about 12 hours per week per course on academic work, which is similar to the time spent in 2005. However, faculty in reading-intensive disciplines report that students are entering their classes "with less experience reading complex prose and less capacity for focus and sustained attention," and that in response "they've had to trim some readings and drop others entirely, that they've had to switch from novels to short stories." And yet grades inexorably keep rising.

Claybaugh's white paper points to a number of reasons for this, but a key one is competition for resources. You might think that Harvard would be insulated from these sorts of market pressures on grades; it has the largest endowment of any university in the world, which is approaching US$60 billion, and can afford to reject 96% of applicants. However, Claybaugh writes that faculty "know that they are competing with one another for students. With good enrollments come guaranteed teaching for graduate students, the possibility of more faculty lines for departments, and the opportunity to introduce students to the subjects we've devoted our lives to studying. It makes sense, in this context, for faculty to lower standards in order to raise enrollments. 'Grading at Harvard is in a race to the bottom,' one faculty member observed. 'This is a classic game theory problem.'" In this case, of course, "the bottom" is the top of the grading scale. And if this is true at Harvard, of all places, grade inflation pressures are even greater at institutions that are more dependent on enrollments simply to meet their operating expenses.

---

1. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 4, 16 February 2023: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/joe-moran/gen-z-and-me
2. The Rhetoric of Aristotle, translated, with an analysis and critical notes, by J.E.C. Welldon. Macmillan, 1886, Book II, Section xii, pp. 164-166 (translation slightly altered). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hxjtry&view=1up&seq=216
3. Amanda Ruggeri, "People have always whinged about young adults. Here's proof." BBC Worklife, 2 October 2017. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20171003-proof-that-people-have-always-complained-about-young-adults.
   See also: John Protzko and Jonathan W. Schooler, 2019, "Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking," Science Advances, Vol. 5, No. 10:eaav5916. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6795513/pdf/aav5916.pdf;
   Jessica Kitt, 2013, "Kids These Days: An Analysis of the Rhetoric against Youth across Five Generations," https://cah.ucf.edu/writingrhetoric/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2019/10/KWS2_Kitt.pdf
4. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 6, 16 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/lorna-finlayson/diary
5. Heather E. Campbell, 2019, "JPAE at 25: Looking back and moving forward on teaching evaluations," Journal of Public Affairs Education, Vol. 25, Issue 1, pp. 23-29, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2018.1558823
6. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 5, 2 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/william-davies/the-reaction-economy
7. London Review of Books, Vol. 45, No. 6, 16 March 2023. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley
8. See "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," in Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, Pantheon, 1969, pp. 159-220.

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Image source: Allen & Unwin

Do genres even exist in popular music anymore? Here's a comparison: a list of the Billboard top ten singles of 2021, compared with the same list from the pre-Internet era of 40 years earlier [1]:

#	2021		1981
	Song	Artist	Song	Artist
1	"Levitating"	Dua Lipa feat. DaBaby	"Bette Davis Eyes"	Kim Carnes
2	"Save Your Tears"	The Weeknd & Ariana Grande	"Endless Love"	Diana Ross & Lionel Richie
3	"Blinding Lights"	The Weeknd	"Lady"	Kenny Rogers
4	"Mood"	24kGoldn feat. Iann Dior	"(Just Like) Starting Over"	John Lennon
5	"Good 4 U"	Olivia Rodrigo	"Jessie's Girl"	Rick Springfield
6	"Kiss Me More"	Doja Cat feat. SZA	"Celebration"	Kool & the Gang
7	"Leave the Door Open"	Silk Sonic (Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak)	"Kiss on My List"	Hall & Oates
8	"Driver's License"	Olivia Rodrigo	"I Love a Rainy Night"	Eddie Rabbitt
9	"Montero (Call Me by Your Name)"	Lil Nas X	"9 to 5"	Dolly Parton
10	"Peaches"	Justin Bieber feat. Daniel Caesar & Giveon	"Keep on Loving You"	REO Speedwagon

In 1981 radio was the chief way most people heard new music. It was segregated into formats (Top 40, MOR [Middle of the Road]/Easy Listening, Quiet Storm, AOR [Album Oriented Rock], R&B, Country, etc.) and genrified playlists that were largely pre-determined by program directors and heavily dependent on major-label promotion of long-established acts. [2] 

Each entry in the 1981 list (with the possible exception of "Bette Davis Eyes," a synthpop arrangement of a 1974 Jackie DeShannon song) is pretty firmly associated with a particular genre/format. Notable for their absence are any artists associated with rap; notable for their presence are artists associated with rock (John Lennon, Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon) and country (Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt, and Kenny Rogers—although "Lady" was written and produced by Lionel Richie).  [3]

Kim Carnes: "Bette Davis Eyes" (1981). Image source: discogs.com

In 2021, most of the chart entries require slashes in their description (generally rap/R&B/dance: rapped or rhythmically delivered verses over a dance beat followed by a melodic chorus); more than half involve collaborations or feature guest stars (versus one in 1981). Three tracks are throwbacks (The Weeknd to 80s synthpop, Silk Sonic to 70s soul) while only one ("Good 4 U") could be described as rock; none are country.

Of course, since 1981 the U.S. has seen demographic shifts, the mainstreaming of rap, and changes in the way the chart positions are calculated so that they reflect more closely what (young) people are actually listening to. But I think something else is going on as well.

With the rise of streaming services, video platforms, and social media, virtually the entirety of recorded popular music (yes, I know, with exceptions) is available to everyone all the time. Since new popular music is often a recombination and reinterpretation of older elements, I'd expect genre boundaries to become blurred and get blurrier over time. And no, even though I've aged out of the target audience of popular music I'm not saying that it all sounds the same. I am saying that most hit songs seem to be converging on a hybrid style that draws on elements from multiple genres, especially rap, R&B and dance.

So Kelefa Sanneh's Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres appears at a time when genre may no longer define how popular music is made or heard, at least by people who came of age with YouTube (founded 2005), Spotify (founded 2006), and TikTok (founded 2016). Sanneh acknowledges this: at the end of the book he writes,

In theory, the popularity of companies like Spotify might have driven further fragmentation, because they made it so easy for listeners to explore far-flung genres. In practice, though, Spotify and its competitors, including Apple Music and YouTube, encouraged a new pop consolidation. Freed from the burden of having to decide which albums were the ones they wanted to pay for and add to their collections, millions of listeners gravitated toward similar sounds.

[Interjection from me: I would say that rather than listeners "gravitating" towards similar sounds, instead they are being pushed by social media algorithms that have been successfully designed to give them new music that closely matches the music they've previously listened to.]

In the new streaming era, the pop charts were full of moody, atmospheric songs that combined slangy, conversational lyrics with hip-hop-inspired beats. The new pop stars tended to draw influence from diverse sources, and yet their songs were highly compatible, blending seamlessly together on the online playlists that were displacing albums as the dominant form of music consumption. . .That development shaped this book, in which. . .many of the chapters end on a note of convergence, with broadly popular performers who are eager to shrug off the weight of genre identity. (p. 452)

Even before streaming, of course, many musicians rejected the confinements of genre. But indeed, popular music genres may be headed for the same obsolescence as (alas!) the record stores that used them as ways of organizing their stock. (Perhaps, then, one reason for Sanneh's loyalty to the idea of genre is the time he spent as a record-store clerk. In my fantasy record store, everything would be shelved alphabetically, so Motörhead would be flanked by Wes Montgomery and Mozart, and Handel would be next to Hendrix (as they were in real life). You can be glad you never had to shop there.)

The genres Sanneh chooses as his focus are rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and "pop," each of which receives a separate chapter. Of course, entire books can be (and have been) written about each of these genres, so Sanneh can only provide a broad overview of each. He is an excellent, thoughtful guide to a huge range of music: his taste is broad, and he has interesting things to say about each of the genres he covers.

However, I think his book inadvertently illustrates the truism that the popular music we listen to from the time we enter our teen years (when many of us first start developing our own tastes) until the time we're exiting young adulthood 15 or 20 years later (by which time our tastes have become more-or-less fixed) remains the most emotionally resonant for us. Sanneh reports that "I didn't start obsessing over music until my fourteenth birthday, in 1990, when my best friend, Matt, gave me a mixtape. . .carefully compiled from his own burgeoning punk-rock collection" (pp. 216-217). (Ah, mixtapes, those unique gifts of friendship and musical seduction. Sorry, young moderns, but Spotify playlists just aren't the same, especially if you send the same playlist to different people.) Sanneh's teen years (late 1980s to the mid-1990s) also witnessed the emergence of rappers such as Public Enemy, Dr. Dre and NWA, Ice-T, Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z. Guess which are the two most energetic, engaged chapters of Major Labels?

Public Enemy: "Fight the Power" (1989). Image source: discogs.com

But perhaps because he came of musical age in the late 1980s and 1990s, Sanneh does not always do full justice to developments in his chosen genres in earlier decades. For example, the chapter on pop highlights the Carpenters, jumps to Britain's New Pop bands of the mid-1980s (Human League, ABC, Culture Club, Pet Shop Boys), namechecks 1980s and 1990s boy bands (New Edition, New Kids on the Block, NSYNC), and briefly acknowledges Madonna, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, K-Pop bands BTS and BLACKPINK, and Canadian chanteuse Céline Dion (or more properly, Carl Wilson's slim book on the Dion phenomenon, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007)).

But pop existed for decades before the Carpenters: it can be traced back to 18th-century ballads, 19th-century music halls, early 20th-century Tin Pan Alley. Later came the influence of Broadway and film musicals on the hit parade in the 1930s and 1940s, and the development of the American Songbook of standards. Even if Sanneh wanted to focus on pop music after the emergence of rock 'n' roll, he doesn't discuss the refashioning of the music of black artists by mainstream white singers (Pat Boone's version of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" is a notorious example). Sanneh uses Lulu's "To Sir With Love" as an example of the pop that successfully co-existed in the 1960s alongside the Beatles, Stones and Hendrix, but doesn't mention chart-topping groups such as The Association ("Cherish," "(Everyone Knows It's) Windy"), The Seekers ("Georgy Girl"), The Mamas & The Papas ("California Dreamin'," "Monday, Monday," "Dedicated to the One I Love"), or the 5th Dimension ("Aquarius," "One Less Bell To Answer"). Also lacking any acknowledgement: New York's Brill Building, the L.A. session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, or pop hitmakers Lou Adler, Don Kirshner, and Phil Spector (!), none of whom appear in the book's index.

Jerry Butler: "Make It Easy On Yourself" (1962). Image source: discogs.com

Also absent are 1960s pop performers such as Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Alfie"), Jerry Butler ("Make It Easy on Yourself"), Petula Clark ("Downtown"), Jackie DeShannon ("What the World Needs Now Is Love"), Tom Jones ("What's New, Pussycat?"), Sandie Shaw ("There's Always Something There to Remind Me"), and Dusty Springfield ("I Just Don't Know What To Do with Myself," "The Look of Love"). Most surprising, perhaps, is the glancing mention of Dionne Warwick ("Walk On By," "I Say a Little Prayer," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," and many others), the great exponent of the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David—who don't appear in the book at all, and who wrote all of the songs mentioned in this paragraph except "Downtown" (written by Tony Hatch).

Sanneh was also born too late to personally experience punk in its original incarnations. (And back then punk could never have been described as "popular" except in the sense of "carried on by ordinary people." Tom Carson wrote a memorable Village Voice piece in the early 1980s entitled "25,000 Dead Kennedys fans can be wrong," a reference to the 1959 album 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, which is itself a reference to the 1927 song by Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher, "50 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.") As a result Sanneh's account of 1970s and early 1980s punk and post-punk focuses on the records he played during his time as a college radio DJ two decades later, and draws on zines (primarily MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL) and other people's books.

The first issue of Maximum RocknRoll (1982). Image source: Fanzine Addiction

While I understand that Sanneh's project is to trace the histories of his chosen genres, rather than focus on specific bands, a lot is omitted. For example, he talks about the attention focussed on the punk scene's racial and sexual politics by the 1990s zine riot grrrl. But such questions were also hotly debated in the 1970s. Sanneh has a section on punk politics that discusses the contradictions in 1970s punk imagery (swastikas were worn at various times by the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, as well as by Siouxsie Sioux), the tensions between punks and racist skinheads, and the Rock Against Racism movement. But the multi-racial punk-adjacent ska-influenced 2 Tone bands such as The Specials, The Selecter, and The (English) Beat go unmentioned, and more could have been made of the influences of reggae, dub, and funk on the music of punk and post-punk bands such as The Clash, Gang of Four, and Public Image Ltd.

(One fond memory from my misspent youth is of a concert by the hardcore punk band 7 Seconds in 1983 or 1984 at Ruthie's Inn, a neighborhood bar in a working-class black area of Berkeley. The (black) promoter Wes Robinson had begun booking hardcore shows there, and the older black clientele at the bar would generally look on warily at the spike-haired white teenagers and early-20s who would throng the stage and mosh at shows by thrash bands. But that night when 7 Seconds launched into their anthem "Racism Sucks!" I watched in astonishment and delight as the band and stage divers were joined onstage by one of the Ruthie's regulars, dancing and singing along with the chorus: "Racism sucks! Racism sucks! Ra-cism fucking sucks!")

7 Seconds: Skins, Brains & Guts (1982).  Image source: discogs.com

It's not until Sanneh's discussion of the emergence of Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl in the 1990s that the role of women in punk and post-punk is (glancingly) mentioned. This does a disservice to the many bands from the 1970s and early 1980s that were led by (or composed entirely of) women: The Slits, The Raincoats, Au Pairs, Delta 5, The Mo-dettes, Kleenex/Liliput, Essential Logic, Young Marble Giants, The Bloods, and Bush Tetras, to name a few (most of which are not referenced).

Sanneh mentions the admiration of the Riot Grrrl bands for Joan Jett, but what he doesn't say is that the admiration was mutual. After the brutal murder of Mia Zapata, singer for the Seattle band The Gits, Jett co-wrote the song "Go Home" with Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna to publicize and help fund the investigation into Zapata's death (the song was released on Jett's album Pure and Simple). Jett also toured with the remaining members of The Gits under the name Evil Stig ("Gits Live" backwards) to raise funds for the investigation and the social justice organization Home Alive. She also produced and performed on Bikini Kill's New Radio EP, which includes their signature song "Rebel Girl."

Bikini Kill: New Radio (1993). Image source: discogs.com

Another odd omission for a history of popular music: Sanneh doesn't discuss in detail the exploitative economics of the music industry, which have come to the fore once again in recent years as it has become clear that streaming services pay to artists an infinitesimal fraction of the value of their music. It's a rich subject that Sanneh avoids almost entirely.

I realize that this post sounds like a pan, but I don't intend it to be so negative. I enjoyed reading Major Labels very much. Sanneh is an excellent writer, and I will be forever grateful to him for untangling the differences among some of the main sub-genres of electronic dance music (Wikipedia lists nearly 400 sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-genres of EDM). He also makes interesting connections between seemingly disparate musical forms, such as his comparison of metronomic electronic dance music to the Grateful Dead:

Like dance music, the Dead's music was rather hard to put into words: listeners describing a particularly good live set tended to wax abstract about energy and vibes. Like dance music, the Dead's music sounded rather monotonous to people who didn't like it, and who couldn't register the subtle variations and innovations that so exhilarated fans. Like dance music, the Grateful Dead's music did not translate particularly well to albums; true believers insisted that studio recordings were no substitute for hours-long live sets. And like dance music, the Dead's music was said to be enhanced by chemical intoxication—and, by outsiders, to be intolerable without it. (p. 401)

Ultimately, Sanneh's project of is one of synthesis, not fission; his church is syncretic, not factional. And the sections of the book that deal with his own experiences and enthusiasms are highly engaging. Read Major Labels for its useful overviews of the past few decades' worth of developments in popular music, and especially for the experiences of a music obsessive who became a thoughtful critic for cultural arbiters such as the New York Times and the New Yorker at a time of fundamental change in the music industry. For in-depth analysis of specific musical artists and time periods, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. And in the interests of directing readers to those sources, may I suggest that the paperback edition might be enhanced by the addition of a "Further Reading" list? Just a thought.

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1. Of course, the very idea of a Top 10, 20, or 40 was antithetical to the way I approached music in 1981: I generally listened to albums, or album sides, not individual songs, and the idea of ranking them in numerical order would have been risible. But for comparison's sake, and a sense of how far the Top 40 was from the musical taste of at least some people in their teens and 20s, here is my personal list of the top 20 songs released in 1981 or late 1980, in alphabetical order by artist:
   
   
   • "O Superman": Laurie Anderson
   • "Headache (for Michelle)": Au Pairs
     
   • "Depression": Black Flag
     
   • "Nazi Punks Fuck Off": Dead Kennedys
     
   • "That's the Joint": Funky 4 + 1
     
   • "To Hell with Poverty": Gang of Four
   • "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel": Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
   • "She's Like Heroin To Me": The Gun Club
     
   • "That's Entertainment": The Jam
   • "Dead Souls": Joy Division
   • "Change": Killing Joke
   • "Screaming at a Wall": Minor Threat
   • "That's When I Reach For My Revolver": Mission of Burma
     
   • "Ceremony": New Order
   • "Talk of the Town": Pretenders
     
   • "Pretty in Pink": Psychedelic Furs
     
   • "Shouting Out Loud": The Raincoats
   • "I Hate Music": The Replacements
   • "Tainted Love": Soft Cell
   • "Ghost Town": The Specials
   
   Just missing the list: Joan Armatrading ("When I Get It Right"), Flipper ("Sex Bomb"), The Go-Gos ("Our Lips Are Sealed"), Rick James ("Give It To Me Baby"), Public Image Ltd. ("Flowers of Romance"), Ramones ("Don't Go").
2. The average age of the charting artists in 1981 was 36, with the youngest (Robert "Kool" Bell) being 31; in 2021, the average age was almost a decade younger, with the youngest (showbiz veteran Olivia Rodrigo) being 18.
3. Parton and Rogers are in the Country Music Hall of Fame; Rabbitt is in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, won Country Songwriter of the Year in 1979, and had been the opening act for tours by both Parton and Rogers.